[Al_U_Card]

 Daniel1960, on 2013-September-17, 07:30, said:

On a separate issue, Gavin and company are busy explaining away the latests IPCC graph showing observations and models diverging. Gavin stated, "That models and observations do not match in all respects is normal and expected." True to form, he is believing his models over the recent data, "we don't calibrate the emergent properties of the GCMs to the emergent properties derived from observations." He is standing behind his climate sensitivity value of 3C/ doubling, which he claims is based on paleo measurements, even though many are much lower (1.9 - 2.3).

Oh those Krazy Klimatologists! Just part of the tactics to justify continuing to waste taxpayer's dollars on pointless "experimentation" that never seems to agree with reality.
Bob Carter has a slew of analyses showing that the models have almost no "skill" in their hindcasts....and we are asked to make policy decisions based on their "projections"???

[onoway]

 Daniel1960, on 2013-September-17, 12:34, said:

Onoway, you state initially that I am wrong, and then everything you say seems to agree with my statement about genetic diversity. Whether natural or artificial is irrelevant; the effect will be the same.

I was referring to your comment that there is basically the same degree of diversity and things are chugging along much as always. They aren't.

The first part of your post noted that nature does a good job of sorting out which new varieties of whatever thrives and multiplies. That's simply not the case with most GMO plants, as I pointed out, they are heavilly guarded by artificial environments to prevent them from having to deal with any of nature's little challenges.

It isn't even only with plants; it also applies to domestic animals, though GMO doesn't apply so much there. The exception I've heard of so far is that scientists are trying to create a cow that doesn't fart. Climate change and all. It seems that nobody noticed that cows fed on grass rather than corn or large amounts of grain, don't in the first place. But just as there are organizations dedicated to preserving heritage seeds in the cause of diversity, so are there groups trying to save threatened varieties of domestic animals...most of which used to be common.

I didn't even note that scientists say we are losing species faster than ever before, I've heard as many as several species a day going extinct. I have little knowledge of that aside from such things as the passenger pigeon, which is hardly a recent event. Extinctions before have mostly been through ignorance and/or accident, small or cosmic.

I was referring to the direct and deliberately active efforts to restrict diversity in an effort to make money by patenting food plants and forcing farmers to grow only those varieties.

[Daniel1960]

Onoaway,

As I stated previosuly, Nature selects those most capable of survival, and so on. We can protect ourselves and other species as much as possible to ward off infection. This could lead to much greater pandemics, as large quantities of species with similar genetic makeup allows virus to spread rapidly. I think we agree on that part. However, our disagreement rests on whether this is happening with a greater frequency today.

I have heard a similar statement about losing species, and it refers to the estimates concerning rainforest destruction. Since two-thirds of all species reside in the rainforest, the cutting down of the trees, must lead to numerous extinctions. An analysis is presented here:

http://www.rainfores...ies-extinctions

[onoway]

Well, the process we are following now is more appropriate to a hostile environment like the moon than it is to a natural environment which managed to provide well for people for however many thousands of years until we decided we could make things work better, things are really quite simple, no need to consider complexity at all and nature was our enemy.

As I said, I know very little about loss of diversity outside of my area of concern; there are too many things to be concerned about and only so much energy. Like most other people I've heard about "THE TREE" that someone supposed would be the straw that broke the camels back in terms of the rainforest being able to cope. I DO know that a number of people who have turned their back on the scientifically recommended and traditional way of doing things have restored diversity when they restored habitat..Willie Smits, Allan Savory, Sepp Holtzer, Bill Mollison are some examples, all working in entirely different climates initially, found exactly the same result. Willie Smits has a terrific TED Talk and his project has been hugely successful in all regards as far as I can tell.

I am a bit cynical about large organizations since I learned that an organization supposedly dedicated to "saving the earth" was using RoundUp on plants they imagined were non natives. I think that most of them walk a fine line between actually doing anything productive and not annoying too much the "powers that be". Greenpeace, whatever you or I might think of their various activities, has been less concerned about that than they have in following their convictions.

But surely you can see that thousands upon thousands of acres of monocrop held in production by chemicals, some of which sterilize the soil for anything else to grow, sometimes up to 10 YEARS, as just one example, is going to affect diversity. The AIM and GOAL of monocropping is to restrict diversity. Now we are monocropping everything from almond trees to onions.

Fields used to be relatively small and bordered by hedgerows which sheltered and provided for any number of life forms from microbes to birds and animals. Now fields can literally be up to a thousand acres of one field, stripped of any trees and running as close to the road as possible. No habitat for anything else including in the soil which holds up the crop plant. The habitat loss is also considered to be partly responsible for colony collapse disorder AND the disappearance of native bee species as well as badly stressing bat populations, and bats are also far far more useful to humans than people give them credit for.

Even the lawns that people care for so assiduously are an enemy to diversity as anyone who has been vigorously applying chemicals to rid their lawn of clover and dandelions demonstrates. It always bemuses me to see people spending hours in a veggie garden tenderly looking after their plants, when the dandelions they just poisoned or dug up are vastly more nutritious than almost anything else they grow, as is the pigweed they pull up as soon as they see it, etc. I don't have the link handy but someone who studied food said that centuries ago, people ate something like 1900 different plants. The average now is way less than half of that. I imagine most people would have difficulty naming even 300 edible plants, less than 1/6 of what used to be common in diets. I know I couldn't get anywhere close to 1900 without resorting to outside sources, and even then would be a challenge. Try it! Then tell me we haven't lost diversity. And that's just the food we eat!

Monocropping is the antithesis of diversity and its mortal enemy. I'm bewildered that you don't see that as having any particular effect on diversity at all.

[PassedOut]

 onoway, on 2013-September-18, 10:48, said:

Monocropping is the antithesis of diversity and its mortal enemy.

Intuitively it seems to me you are right about that. I noticed that Monsanto is one of the sponsors of the Doomsday Seed Vault. What do you suppose they are up to with that?

[Al_U_Card]

 PassedOut, on 2013-September-18, 13:03, said:

Intuitively it seems to me you are right about that. I noticed that Monsanto is one of the sponsors of the Doomsday Seed Vault. What do you suppose they are up to with that?

Same reason ExxonMobil, BP and Shell are all into "green" energy programs. (Except less government subsidies but a better chance of "cornering" the market-garden, so to speak.)

[onoway]

 PassedOut, on 2013-September-18, 13:03, said:

Intuitively it seems to me you are right about that. I noticed that Monsanto is one of the sponsors of the Doomsday Seed Vault. What do you suppose they are up to with that?

They get access to the seeds in there (although you and I can't) and so can use the material for their genetic engineering. I imagine it's also what Al_U_Card said, PR, but it's like allowing the fox to help guard the chickens.

In spite of the patents, scientists are still not "creating" anything, they're just moving things around into new combinations and messing about with what they consider the raw material. So the seed bank is a treasure trove to them of raw material.

[Al_U_Card]

A rising tide of...

sentiment? awareness? precision?

From the abstract:

The location of tide gauges is not random. If their locations are positively (negatively) correlated with SLR, estimates of global SLR will be biased upwards (downwards). We show that the location of tide gauges in 2000 is independent of SLR as measured by satellite altimetry. Therefore PSMSL tide gauges constitute a quasi-random sample and inferences of SLR based on them are unbiased, and there is no need for data reconstructions. By contrast, tide gauges dating back to the 19th century were locatedwhere sea levels happened to be rising. Data reconstructions based on these tide gauges are therefore likely to over-estimate sea level rise.
We therefore study individual tide gauge data on sea levels from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) during 1807 – 2010 without recourse to data reconstruction. Although mean sea levels are rising by 1mm/year, sea level rise is local rather than global, and is concentrated in the Baltic and Adriatic seas, South East Asia and the Atlantic coast of the United States. In these locations, covering 35 percent of tide gauges, sea levels rose on average by 3.8mm/year. Sea levels were stable in locations covered by 61 percent of tide gauges, and sea levels fell in locations covered by 4 percent of tide gauges. In these locations sea levels fell on average by almost 6mm/year.

[onoway]

 PassedOut, on 2013-September-18, 13:03, said:

Intuitively it seems to me you are right about that. I noticed that Monsanto is one of the sponsors of the Doomsday Seed Vault. What do you suppose they are up to with that?

Dr. Vandana Shiva ( http://www.myhero.co....asp?hero=Shiva ) started another seed saving project with the express purpose of saving seed which may otherwise be lost forever, and that seed most definitely will not be available to Monsanto and their ilk.

Meanwhile, the UN has even got into the discussion and called for a drastic change in agricultural practices for a number of reasons, but diversity is high on the list:
http://permaculturen...re-food-system/

[onoway]

Something which came to my attention today and is quite alarming;
http://www.geoengine...ic-of-our-time/

[PassedOut]

 onoway, on 2013-September-20, 10:10, said:

Something which came to my attention today and is quite alarming;
http://www.geoengine...ic-of-our-time/

Be careful with stuff like that. The notion that the US government is secretly spraying "chemtrails" over us has gained a foothold among some folks, just like the notion that the US government was complicit in the destruction of the twin towers. For a government that can't keep anything secret for long, I don't imagine that they'd be able to shut up every pilot who has been ordered to spray his relatives from the sky.

[onoway]

 PassedOut, on 2013-September-20, 11:25, said:

Be careful with stuff like that. The notion that the US government is secretly spraying "chemtrails" over us has gained a foothold among some folks, just like the notion that the US government was complicit in the destruction of the twin towers. For a government that can't keep anything secret for long, I don't imagine that they'd be able to shut up every pilot who has been ordered to spray his relatives from the sky.

yeah I was just coming back to edit that as when I started to look into it a bit more it quickly got into some strong "conspiracy" stuff which raised red flags. Still, as they say, "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean nobody is out to get me" and some of the the connections deserve a closer look I think.

As far as the pilots go, I think that would be easy to manage. Pilots are used to doing stuff like seeding rain clouds (they've done that for decades) and puffing out messages and crop dusting. Unless they thought they were carrying bombs or something they are unlikely to think anything much about what they are spraying, and I'm sure they wouldn't be told it was harmful. It might even be that the people doing it (IF they are) don't think it IS harmful.

I think there are two questions; 1) are they doing this and 2) is it deliberate. I think there might be a problem in that at least some of the people associated with this seem to think it's deliberately harmful and that's unfortunate. It might be the same as GMO seeds..someone had a bright idea with good intentions, thinking it was a win/win and then it got away from them. History is littered with such events the classic being rabbits in Australia.

The conspiracy aspect may actually make it more difficult to find out what, if anything, is actually happening, as then people automatically dismiss the whole thing.

What gave some credence to me about this were a couple of things, mostly because a few years ago there was a whole lot of discussion about various techniques which might be used to tackle global warming, and dumping stuff in the atmosphere was being energetically and publicly promoted by various scientists. If you couple that with patents and governments led by politicians way out of their depth in terms of any of the sciences, it could well be happening, albeit with the best of intentions.
Deserves a closer look anyway, I think.

[ArtK78]

I hear the theme music from "The X Files" playing in the background.

[Daniel1960]

 onoway, on 2013-September-20, 10:10, said:

Something which came to my attention today and is quite alarming;
http://www.geoengine...ic-of-our-time/

I echoed Passedout's comments. Another take on his presentation has been posted here:

http://www.metabunk....ngineering.615/

Dane appears to be a contract employee, lacking a sufficient scientific background, and making claims based on limited evidence.

[onoway]

 PassedOut, on 2013-September-20, 11:25, said:

Be careful with stuff like that. The notion that the US government is secretly spraying "chemtrails" over us has gained a foothold among some folks, just like the notion that the US government was complicit in the destruction of the twin towers. For a government that can't keep anything secret for long, I don't imagine that they'd be able to shut up every pilot who has been ordered to spray his relatives from the sky.

yeah I was just coming back to edit that as when I started to look into it a bit more it quickly got into some strong "conspiracy" stuff which raised red flags. Still, as they say, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean nobody is out to get me" and some of the the connections deserve a closer look I think.

As far as the pilots go, I think that would be easy to manage. Pilots are used to doing stuff like seeding rain clouds (they have done that for decades) and puffing out messages and crop dusting. Unless they thought they were carrying bombs or something they are unlikely to think anything much about what they are spraying, and I'm sure they wouldn't be told it was harmful. It might even be that the people doing it (IF they are) don't think it IS harmful.

I think there are two questions; 1) are they doing this and 2) is it deliberate. I think there might be a problem in that at least some of the people associated with this seem to think it's deliberately harmful and that's unfortunate. It might be the same as GMO seeds..someone had a bright idea with good intentions, thinking it was a win/win and then it got away from them. History is littered with such events the classic being rabbits in Australia.

The conspiracy aspect may actually make it more difficult to find out what, if anything, is actually happening, as then people automatically dismiss the whole thing. Oh and at least they don't single out the US Government, this is an equal opportunity conspiracy, include all the major world governments

What gave some credence to me about this were a couple of things, mostly because a few years ago there was a whole lot of discussion about various techniques which might be used to tackle global warming, and dumping stuff in the atmosphere was being energetically and publicly promoted by various scientists. If you couple that with patents and governments led by politicians way out of their depth in terms of any of the sciences, it could well be happening, albeit with the best of intentions.

[onoway]

 Daniel1960, on 2013-September-20, 12:14, said:

I echoed Passedout's comments. Another take on his presentation has been posted here:

http://www.metabunk....ngineering.615/

Dane appears to be a contract employee, lacking a sufficient scientific background, and making claims based on limited evidence.

Well... I read a bunch of the posts on metabunk and he lost me on three different points, at which point I found other (better?) things to do. The first, he claimed that scientists cited by Dane did not say anything about urgently needing to learn more about methane erupting from the thawing permafrost; one of the sentences in the very first paragraph of the article he cited said exactly that. When someone showed a BBC clip of a boat sinking in an air bubble mimicking a methane plume, his only retort was that it looked like it had been set up to sink (which of course it was, the point being that it DID) and finally when he claimed that tropical soils were basically suffering from specifically an aluminum surplus in the soil which made crops at the very least unprofitable, and demonstrating the difference between an aluminum resistant corn and an aluminum sensitive corn. It's typical of such studies to isolate one element and deal with only that element and then crow with glee that they've proven their point.

People have been working in these areas to help the indigenous people there to manage their soils better through other techniques than growing gmo corn with a good deal of success. You might want to watch the BBC series on GMO soybeans in Brazil to see what that's about. I can likely find the link if you're interested.

I think it's unfortunate when one person with (apparently) an axe to grind faces off with another with the opposite axe to grind as neither forwards knowledge a whole lot.

[mike777]

Onoway


what is your big really big main point?



I understand right wingers will disagree but what is your point>
-------------------


mY POINT has always been .....global warming...yes.....how urgent...I don't know...

[Al_U_Card]

a point worth consideration

0.3% climate consensus not 97.1%
MAJOR peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.

A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous:

“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” [Emphasis added]
The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.

The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.

Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.

This shock result comes scant weeks before the United Nations’ climate panel, the IPCC, issues its fifth five-yearly climate assessment, claiming “95% confidence” in the imagined – and, as the new paper shows, imaginary – consensus.

Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: a Rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change’ decisively rejects suggestions by Cook and others that those who say few scientists explicitly support the supposedly near-unanimous climate consensus are misinforming and misleading the public.

Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%.

“It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”

Dr Willie Soon, a distinguished solar physicist, quoted the late scientist-author Michael Crichton, who had said: “If it’s science, it isn’t consensus; if it’s consensus, it isn’t science.” He added: “There has been no global warming for almost 17 years. None of the ‘consensus’ computer models predicted that.”

Dr William Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.

“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s imminent Fifth Assessment Report, who found the errors in Cook’s data, said: “It may be that more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950. But only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly. Cook had not considered how many papers merely implied that. No doubt many scientists consider it possible, as we do, that Man caused some warming, but not most warming.

“It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.”

Contact David Legates at Udel.edu for more information

SkepticalScience...the gift that keeps on giving.

[Al_U_Card]

 onoway, on 2013-September-19, 18:44, said:

Dr. Vandana Shiva ( http://www.myhero.co....asp?hero=Shiva ) started another seed saving project with the express purpose of saving seed which may otherwise be lost forever, and that seed most definitely will not be available to Monsanto and their ilk.

Meanwhile, the UN has even got into the discussion and called for a drastic change in agricultural practices for a number of reasons, but diversity is high on the list:
http://permaculturen...re-food-system/

An interesting presentation of a paper on diversity and the effect that climate policy could have on it. Lots of issues and "unintended" consequences as per the usual governmental approach to anything.

Adapt or mitigate, that is the question.

[Al_U_Card]

AR5 is out and confidence (limits) rules!

Despite not as much warming as previously expected.

Despite observationally-based calculations of a lower climate sensitivity to [CO2].

Despite the continued failure of the models to provide similarity to real-world situations (hot-spot etc.).

The IPCC is even more sure that the warming climate (well, the "stalled" warming due to deep-ocean heat sequestration...) is even more confidently due to.....not greenhouse gases friends....but the filthy, evil, reprehensible....HUMAN INFLUENCE!

Oh the prevarication....it burns!!!